1. Field of Endeavor
The present invention relates to nucleic acid reactions and more particularly to polymerase chain reactions with high throughput flow through sample preparation using magnetic beads.
2. State of Technology
U.S. Pat. No. 6,372,486 for a thermo cycler to David M. Fripp issued Apr. 16, 2002 provides the following background information, “Traditionally, scientists have used the technique of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to synthesize defined sequences of DNA. This generally involves a three step procedure: separation of the DNA to be amplified (template DNA); annealing of short complimentary DNA sequences (primers) to the template DNA and finally the addition of deoxynucleotides to the primer strands in order to copy the template DNA. This is usually performed in a thermal cycling machine where a cycle of three different temperatures is repeated approximately 25-35 times. Template DNA separation and synthesis steps occur at defined temperatures. However, the temperature at which the primer binds to the DNA, may need optimizing in order for this step to occur efficiently and achieve desirable PCR results. Primer annealing optimization experiments usually involve setting up a number of different experiments where only the primer annealing temperature is varied. The experiment may need to be performed 3 or 4 times in order to determine the optimum binding temperature. These experiments would have to be repeated each time a new set of primers was required for different PCRs. The development of a temperature gradient block enables the scientists to determine the optimum binding temperatures of several primer sets in a single experiment.”
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2002/0072112 for a thermal cycler for automatic performance of the polymerase chain reaction with close temperature control to John Atwood published Jun. 13, 2002 provides the following background information, “Applications of PCR technology are now moving from basic research to applications in which large numbers of similar amplifications are routinely run. These areas include diagnostic research, biopharmaceutical development, genetic analysis, and environmental testing. Users in these areas would benefit from a high performance PCR system that would provide the user with high throughput, rapid turn-around time, and reproducible results. Users in these areas must be assured of reproducibility from sample-to-sample, run-to-run, lab-to-lab, and instrument-to-instrument.”